Deep harbour, p.1
Deep Harbour, page 1
Deep Harbour
TOVE ALSTERDAL
translated by Alice Menzies
Contents
Title Page
Deep Harbour
From The Ångermanland News
Afterword
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
The last of the ice had melted or drifted out to sea, and there was a light, south-easterly breeze. They exchanged a few final words before going under.
‘Stick together down there, OK? And let me know the minute you run into any trouble.’
‘Absolutely, OK.’
The other diver seemed as comfortable in fins as regular shoes. Ylva had met him for the first time the evening before, after her bus arrived in Lunde and she checked in at the guest house. She was grateful, so grateful to get to go out with them, that this spring would be nothing like the last.
Yes, she was aware of the dangers. And yes, she was qualified to dive to eighteen metres and had put in the requisite number of hours.
No, she hadn’t realised just how cold the river would be at five in the morning in late April, but she didn’t mention that.
Ylva fastened her buoyancy compensator, various hoses looping back to her tank. Mask on, regulator in, check that the air is flowing and the gauges are working properly – they went through the silent routine she liked so much. Signalling that everything is OK, I’m ready. I’m going down now, you follow me. We’ve got each other’s backs, and I’m here for you no matter what.
Visibility was poor just beneath the surface, and she dumped air from her buoyancy compensator in order to descend. Slowly, not too fast. Breathing calmly, deeply. The water was the colour of unfermented beer, sediment swirling in the fast-flowing current, and she could feel the chill, despite her thick drysuit.
It was a far cry from the exotic adventures people liked to boast about on social media; no sign of the bright shoals of fish that looked like they belonged in some Disney film.
During her final outdoor dive on the training course two years ago, it was as though the world had opened up to her. There was so much left to explore, dimensions of the future she hadn’t been expecting.
The whole thing had started with a man, of course. They dated for a few months, shared their hopes and dreams for the rest of their lives. Ylva wanted to cut back her hours and possibly even buy a summerhouse, something simple somewhere, but the man whose name she would rather forget had wanted to go diving along the coral reef in Tahiti, to sail around the islands by the Great Barrier Reef; he said he knew of places mass tourism hadn’t reached yet. In her quiet moments, she had started googling diving courses, afraid she wouldn’t be able to handle it. That she would panic, be unable to breathe. She couldn’t afford for that to happen on a boat in Australia, she had decided, and so she secretly enrolled in diving lessons at the local pool that winter.
Eight metres, nine, but they still hadn’t quite reached the bottom. Ylva could no longer tell that her gloves were red; all colours disappeared at these depths.
She allowed herself to sink a little deeper.
The final outdoor dive had been all that stood between her and her qualification when the man stopped responding. Everything had moved a little too fast, he wrote, when he finally replied to her long thread of messages. She was a nice girl, but he needed time. Wasn’t quite done with his ex yet.
And so there she was, unable to hold on to someone, yet again. A lifetime of loneliness stretching out in front of her. She had also blown thousands of kronor she would never get back, learned to breathe underwater and wrecked her hair with all the chlorine.
No, she had told herself. She would get her certificate. That way she could post about it on Facebook, tell everyone: look what I’ve gone and done!
And then she did her final dive and discovered the new world that opened up to her, and from that point on it no longer had anything to do with him. After that, she had taken every opportunity she could to go diving in the Stockholm archipelago, and that was when she heard all about the many unexplored wrecks up north, in the Ångerman River.
Ylva caught sight of something at the edge of her beam of light. Posts of some kind. Huge lumps of wood that seemed to be straining towards her. She checked her depth – fourteen metres – and realised what it was.
The sunken bridge.
The broken spans had been forced up in the middle, forming an angular arch a bit like the entrance to a cathedral.
In the diving community, it was known as the Church.
Ylva turned around to make contact with her dive partner, who was busy with his camera off to one side. I’m going this way, she gestured. Is that OK? He raised his hand, which she took as a yes.
A sense of reverence settled over her as she swam through the opening. The silence. The expanse of darkness all around her, shrinking the world to a solitary beam of light. To think that it had been there all this time, the old Sandö Bridge, which collapsed during construction so long ago. Lost to the depths of memory as the twentieth century progressed and the new millennium dawned. Ylva felt an urge to reach out and touch the broken wooden structure as she swam a short way along the other side. The past wasn’t gone; it was real.
As she turned to head back, she realised she was no longer sure which way was which. The darkness was so compact, her torch reaching only a few metres. She had gone too far, and the bridge was suddenly nowhere to be seen. Ylva was both icy cold and red hot, she couldn’t tell which; everything felt different down here.
A diver was supposed to spend two minutes looking for their partner before heading back up to the surface, that was the rule, but Ylva wasn’t sure how much time had already passed. She had just started her ascent when she noticed something big in the darkness up ahead, and she paused. Her first reaction was fear, but she quickly told herself that was stupid. There was nothing to be afraid of here. Angling her beam of light forward, she could make out the side of a boat. She swam slowly towards it, switching to a frog kick to avoid disturbing the sand and sediment.
It was impossible to say how long the wreck had been down there. In the brackish water of the Baltic sea, shipworms didn’t thrive the way they did in saltier environments, which meant that many wooden vessels remained largely intact. Ylva tried to remember what she knew about the wrecks in the river. Those on this side of the Sandö Bridge had been mapped by another team just last summer, which was a dizzying thought. What if she was looking at something no one else had seen close up before, not for 100 years or more? She squinted in through a hole in the hull and saw an overturned chair, something broken – was that china? – and a wall-mounted bed. She moved slowly along the edges of the vessel. There was something on the riverbed, and she swam around the object and experienced a sudden lack of oxygen, as though someone had blocked the hose.
She gripped her regulator, breathing, breathing.
A skull. A human skull, half submerged in the sludge. She felt giddy as she thought about the objects that had once been inside the boat: the book someone was reading, the bowl that had shattered as the boat sank. All of it became real somehow. Life, death, they merged into one. Ylva heard or imagined a roar in her ears, and she exhaled and swallowed in an attempt to even out the pressure, but she couldn’t quite shake it. Why did it feel like she couldn’t breathe when she must have several hours’ worth of air left? She searched for the button to inflate her buoyancy compensator and start the ascent – not too quickly, that could be fatal – but she couldn’t tell the red one from the grey, what was up and what was down. She kicked as hard as she could, causing the sediment to swirl around her, a haze without direction or end.
Allan Westin missed the smell of tar as he approached the dock area. He could still hear the whistle that had once sounded at that time every morning, just before seven, as the workers raced down Lunde’s hills towards the shipyard on their bikes.
Turpentine and diesel, the clanking and the thumping and the lapping of waves as the tugs arrived to have their hulls painted after the winter. He could just see them. There was the Stufvaren and there were the old whaling boats, Björn and Backe, reconfigured to haul logs. There was the Dynäs II, a little grander than all the others with her velvet couches like the Orient Express. King Gustaf VI Adolf himself had travelled in her. There was a thrill in the spring air, something that still brought a sense of life to the area, even though all that was now long gone and the river flowed by empty and quiet.
Ghosts and shadows, wherever he went. The engineer’s villa at the bottom of the hill was gone too, as were the little girls who once sat on the porch and made paper dollies. Not to mention the beer house where the old men played cards and a young Allan might earn himself five öre by running over to tell the missus that her husband had to work late.
The hills were hard on his old knees and hips, especially the last steep slope down to the river, where Rabble started tugging on his lead. The dog had never been given much in the way of training – that was one thing they had in common.
A need for freedom, to be able to go wherever they liked.
No following orders from managing directors, as the sawmill bosses called themselves when they decided one name or another wasn’t good enough. Men who bought themselves titles like Vice Consul of Venezuela, just to make themselves sound a little more important than they were.
He unclipped the lead and sat down on his usual bench, breathing in the slightly salty air from the river, which was flowing freely once again. It spent the winter frozen and mu
Rabble was splashing about in the cold mountain water, barking and lunging at all the sticks that floated by.
Was that a boat out there?
Yup, a small motorboat, approaching from the south cape of Sandö. Heading straight for Lunde, it looked like.
Allan squinted, not that it helped much with his old eyes. It wasn’t until the rickety little thing reached the former dock area that he managed to make out the people on board.
He clipped the reluctant dog back onto the lead and got up.
*
A young man, lithe in his movements, jumped down from the gunwale and secured the lines. He could have been anywhere between twenty and fifty given the way people carried on these days, thought Allan. There was another man there too, slightly older but just as supple, plus a woman sitting perfectly still in the stern. She was no spring chicken, but that’s not to say she was old. Still in her drysuit, though she’d peeled it down to the waist and wrapped a coat around her shoulders. Allan could see all sorts of tubes and kit lying on the deck.
‘Nice weather for diving!’ he called over.
The two men said polite hellos and shook his hand. Probably told him their names, too, but that kind of thing went in one ear and straight out the other. There’d been far too many names over the years, he couldn’t be expected to remember every damn one. Allan thought they said they were marine biologists, but they corrected him. Marine archaeologists. They were in the area to dive the wrecks, had already mapped over three hundred between Sandslån and the High Coast Bridge.
‘Hell’s bells,’ said Allan. ‘Three hundred?’
He knew there was all sorts of junk on the bottom of the river, of course, he just hadn’t realised it was something that might interest educated folks like these. Fishing for logs had always been more popular among the poor, who built their ramshackle houses from sunken timber and other bits of wood they found bobbing around.
‘Right,’ he stuttered. ‘You found anything good, then?’
The young man glanced over to his friends, seemingly unable to speak for himself. Allan got the sense they were hiding something, as though he had caught them red-handed smuggling booze. The woman was still in the boat, hunched over with her head in her hands. She looked like she was seasick.
‘I’m not sure it’s the best idea to start shouting about it,’ said the older of the two men. ‘We don’t want anyone to go down there, you know? Before the police have time to come out, I mean. We know what we’re doing, and we never touch anything, but with some of these hobby divers there’s always a risk.’
‘Eh? A risk of what?’ Allan looked around. Did they really think the area was crawling with people desperate to get into the river in late April? Just for the fun of it? He’d seen a few loopy winter swimmers over the past few months – something they’d started doing during the pandemic – but they were in and out in a few seconds, woolly hats firmly on their heads.
‘What’ve you found, then?’
More damned mumbling. He didn’t want to ask them to repeat it, like some sort of idiot. They’d found a body, he’d caught that much.
‘Ah, hell. A person?’
They nodded.
A skull, half buried in the sediment on the bottom of the river, partly hidden beneath the bow of what they thought must be a boat from the early twentieth century.
‘So he could be from back then?’ said Allan. ‘Whoever you found?’
‘Impossible to say on first glance,’ one of them said. ‘We’re scientists; we don’t like to speculate before there’s been a proper investigation.’
They were planning to report it, had dug out a phone and were discussing whether to call the coastguard or 112. It was hardly an emergency, after all. If they were further south, they could have called the Marine Police, but there was nothing of the sort north of Stockholm.
‘If you call 112, you’ll get someone a hundred odd miles away, up in Umeå,’ Allan spoke up. ‘Bloody centralisation.’
His stomach turned as he gazed out across the river. So many souls had been lost to its depths over the years.
‘But we’ve got police here,’ he said.
Eira Sjödin tugged down her sweatpants, put on a fresh pair of underwear and desperately rummaged through her wardrobe for something slightly more appropriate for an investigator with Violent Crimes. Her top was stained and probably smelled slightly of sweat, but these were the sorts of things she rarely thought about while she was sitting alone in front of her computer at home, relegated to so-called desk duty.
She brewed a pot of coffee and took some sliced bread out of the freezer.
A body in the river, her neighbour had said on the phone. He was with the divers who’d found it right now.
‘Have you called it in?’ Eira had already found her shoes and was on her way out before Allan Westin had time to explain that the person was very much dead.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Bring them over.’
A cool breeze blew through the kitchen as she opened the window to let some fresh air in. Strictly speaking, a body in the river wasn’t a case for Violent Crimes. Not unless they suspected there was foul play involved. It fell under the jurisdiction of the local police, and she no longer worked for them. Just the thought of her old job made Eira long to get back out on the road, driving mile upon mile, never knowing what might be waiting around the next bend.
She moved her laptop to one side and cleared the case files from the kitchen table. Bank statements, names, telephone numbers. A large drug ring that grew bigger and bigger the more she pulled the thread. It was important work, vital for building a case against their prime suspect down in Sundsvall, but Eira hadn’t become a police officer in order to sit in front of a computer all day. It left her feeling restless and drowsy, whether she was in her cramped booth at the station or at the kitchen table – the latter of which had become perfectly acceptable since the pandemic.
Sure, a pregnant woman could go out and speak to a harmless witness on the fringes of a case every now and then, but it was often hard to know what posed a risk, and her bosses took her safety incredibly seriously. That meant desk duty from day one in her new job, because Eira was already pregnant when they offered her the role. It had been so overwhelming and new then, on the boundary between late autumn and winter, and she hadn’t been showing, but she knew she still had to let them know.
There were moments when she worried that she had duped them, taking advantage of the section of law that prevented discrimination, even though they insisted that it was her they wanted, that she wouldn’t be pregnant forever. Her union rep had three children of her own, and she could vouch for that.
‘Hello?’ a voice called from the hall.
As ever, Allan Westin let himself in without knocking; they were neighbours, after all. Rabble came bounding in after him, leaving a trail of mud and wet pawprints on the floor.
They were followed by three people who shook Eira’s hand, two men and a woman. Jesper, Lars and Ylva. She could make a note of their surnames later.
Eira told them all to take a seat, but Allan remained standing by the hob. The aroma of coffee and toast drifted through the kitchen as the woman explained that she had given in to the temptation to swim under the collapsed Sandö Bridge and then lost her bearings. She was in her fifties, grey hair with blonde highlights.
‘It was like I was in a daze.’ She hadn’t touched her toast, and she let the coffee go cold in her mug. ‘Or a dream. I was just staring at the skull and I forgot everything else. Time is so different down there. I couldn’t tell you how long I was there for.’
‘Nine minutes,’ said Jesper, the youngest of the three. Judging by his accent, he came from down south, Värmland. ‘I lost sight of her while I was filming the remains of the bridge. That’s not so uncommon – it’s dark, and visibility is only a few metres. If we lose each other, the protocol is to spend two minutes looking before heading back up to the surface. There was no sign of her up there, so we went down again.’
